The last paragraph could go both ways and agree it appears that something was going on. Do you think it's possible and highly likely that they tried to set up Trump with the Russians?

How would they be setting Trump up if Trump authorized one of his people to travel to Russia during his campaign? Or how could they be setting up Trump when he was doing business with someone who was also doing business with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps? Reference Frederic Bourke. Or how could they be setting Trump up when the Russian diplomat got yanked back to Russia just when the FBI/CIA started to investigate Trumps Russian connections. There more out there that has nothing to do with a setup.

This is like a bad hillbilly reality show trainwreck you can't stop watching.

HUD secretary calling slaves immigrants.

Automakers asking EPA secretary and chief science denier to abdicate his responsibility for protecting the environment

Education secretary that never attended a public school and universally despised by teachers.

Energy secretary that wants to abolish the department and leave the nukes at the curb for goodwill pickup.

Yep.

It should be interesting....And I wish they would look into the Baku Trump Hotel failed deal with connections to known, corrupt foreign politicians

(CNN) — Federal investigators and computer scientists continue to examine whether there was a computer server connection between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank, sources close to the investigation tell CNN.

Questions about the possible connection were widely dismissed four months ago. But the FBI's investigation remains open, the sources said, and is in the hands of the FBI's counterintelligence team -- the same one looking into Russia's suspected interference in the 2016 election.

One U.S. official said investigators find the server relationship "odd" and are not ignoring it. But the official said there is still more work for the FBI to do. Investigators have not yet determined whether a connection would be significant.

These leaked records show that Alfa Bank servers repeatedly looked up the unique internet address of a particular Trump Organization computer server in the United States.

In the computer world, it's the equivalent of looking up someone's phone number -- over and over again. While there isn't necessarily a phone call, it usually indicates an intention to communicate, according to several computer scientists.

What puzzled them was why a Russian bank was repeatedly looking up the contact information for mail1.trump-email.com.

Publicly available internet records show that address, which was registered to the Trump Organization, points to an IP address that lives on an otherwise dull machine operated by a company in the tiny rural town of Lititz, Pennsylvania.

From May 4 until September 23, the Russian bank looked up the address to this Trump corporate server 2,820 times -- more lookups than the Trump server received from any other source.

As noted, Alfa Bank alone represents 80% of the lookups, according to these leaked internet records.

Far back in second place, with 714 such lookups, was a company called Spectrum Health.

Spectrum is a medical facility chain led by Dick DeVos, the husband of Betsy DeVos, who was appointed by Trump as U.S. education secretary.

"It's indicative of communication between Trump, the health organization and the bank outside these servers," he told CNN. "There is some sort of connection I can't explain, and only they are doing it. It could be completely innocent."

I think the most interesting part of this article is the last paragraph.
Binney names who he believes were responsible for leaking Trump's phone calls.

Quote:

NSA Whistleblower Backs Trump Up on Wiretap Claims
Bill Binney, who resigned from NSA in 2001, did not elaborate on President Obama’s specific role in surveilling Trump.

A veteran of the NSA has said President Donald Trump is righ to claim he was wiretapped and monitored. (ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES)
President Donald Trump is "absolutely right" to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community.

"I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, was being monitored," Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned in protest from the organization in 2001, told Fox Business on Monday. Everyone's conversations are being monitored and stored, Binney said.

Binney resigned from NSA shortly after the U.S. approach to intelligence changed following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He "became a whistleblower after discovering that elements of a data-monitoring program he had helped develop -- nicknamed ThinThread -- were being used to spy on Americans," PBS reported.

On Monday he came to the defense of the president, whose allegations on social media over the weekend that outgoing President Barack Obama tapped his phones during the 2016 campaign have rankled Washington.

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!" Trump tweeted.

"Is it legal for a sitting President to be 'wire tapping' a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!... I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!," he continued.

Binney seemed to go further than the assessment of former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a George W. Bush administration official, who offered a tacit defense of Trump to ABC on Sunday.

"This is the difference between being correct and right," Mukasey said. "The president was not correct in saying President Obama ordered a tap on a server in Trump Tower. However, I think he's right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney general – at the Justice Department through the FISA court."

The judges on the FISA court are "not even concerned, nor are they involved in any way with the Executive Order 12333 collection," Binney said during the radio interview. "That's all done outside of the courts. And outside of the Congress."

Binney told Fox the laws that fall under the FISA court's jurisdiction are "simply out there for show" and "trying to show that the government is following the law, and being looked at and overseen by the Senate and House intelligence committees and the courts."

"That's not the main collection program for NSA," Binney said.

What Binney did not delve into, however, was if President Obama directed surveillance on Trump for political purposes during the campaign, a core accusation of Trump's.

But Binney did say events such as publication of details of private calls between President Trump and the Australian prime minister, as well as with the Mexican president, are evidence the intelligence community is playing hardball with the White House.

"I think that's what happened here," Binney told Fox. "The evidence of the conversation of the president of the U.S., President Trump, and the [prime minister] of Australia and the president of Mexico. Releasing those conversations. Those are conversations that are picked up by the FAIRVIEW program, primarily, by NSA."

Beginning QUOTE: The House intelligence committee will investigate President Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama ordered his phones tapped during the closing days of last year’s presidential election campaign, the committee’s chairman announced Tuesday.

Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican, said the claim would be part of the committee’s first open hearing on Russian meddling in the U.S. election, which is now set for March 20. The witness list for that hearing, Nunes said, includes the heads, or former heads, of most of the major American intelligence agencies and may grow.

Nunes acknowledged that he had seen no evidence to back Trump’s claim of wiretapping. But he said the allegation is “quite serious” and in need of investigation.

“I haven’t talked to the president about it,” Nunes said. “They have asked us to look into it, but we were going to look into it anyway.” SNIPPED

The list we obtained includes obscure campaign staffers, contributors to Breitbart and others who have embraced conspiracy theories, as well as dozens of Washington insiders who could be reasonably characterized as part of the “swamp” Trump pledged to drain.

The list is striking for how many former lobbyists it contains: We found at least 36, spanning industries from health insurance and pharmaceuticals to construction, energy and finance. Many of them lobbied in the same areas that are regulated by the agencies they have now joined.

Trumps idea of swamp draining is replacing a Nobel prize winning scientist that was head of EPA with an attorney that exchanged thousands of emails with his fossil fuel industry friend as they wrote his EPA lawsuit briefs.

That's a big accusation and I have a feeling Trump will be digesting crow feathers when this whole thing is over. It won't look good either, but then, he doesn't do a lot that anyway.

Like Binney, I will concede we just don't know. My gut feeling tells me Trump is probably right on this...We know the Obama administration is capable of surveilling ordinary citizens, to hell with their fourth amendment rights.

Remember James Rosen, Fox News reporter? He said, “What happened to me was that the Attorney General, Eric Holder, under Barack Obama as president secretly designated me a criminal co-conspirator and a flight risk and thereby had a federal judge give the government permission to rifle through all my gmails.

“They could read the emails, and then also to get all the phone records associated with about 20 phones that I used at that time in my reporting. All of those phone lines were 202 or 703, which are the area codes associated with Washington and the Pentagon, northern Virginia area. One of those 20 phone lines was 718 and that referred to my parent’s house on Staten Island at that time.”

That's the wrong way to look at it. There's lots of things "we just don't know" but that doesn't shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused. You and I both "just don't know" if that guy walking around in our neighborhood just murdered sixteen nuns in a convent. And we don't get to find out without something tangible to go on other than just whimsical suspicion.

And as far as Trump's accusation goes, there are some things we do very much indeed know, one of which is Obama couldn't have ordered the wiretaps officially. So where is the evidence he is connected to it in any way at all, assuming such a thing even happened in the first place, which itself is dubious?

Quote:

My gut feeling tells me Trump is probably right on this...

Based on what? His track record sucks. Birther movement. Nuff said.

Quote:

We know the Obama administration is capable of surveilling ordinary citizens, to hell with their fourth amendment rights.

Pretty sure that's not true as I just pointed out. There isn't a mechanism for the president to do this other than something below the law.

Quote:

Remember James Rosen, Fox News reporter? He said, “What happened to me was that the Attorney General, Eric Holder, under Barack Obama as president secretly designated me a criminal co-conspirator and a flight risk and thereby had a federal judge give the government permission to rifle through all my gmails.

“They could read the emails, and then also to get all the phone records associated with about 20 phones that I used at that time in my reporting. All of those phone lines were 202 or 703, which are the area codes associated with Washington and the Pentagon, northern Virginia area. One of those 20 phone lines was 718 and that referred to my parent’s house on Staten Island at that time.”